Transcript of Interview

Australians at War Film Archive David Brill (Brillo) - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 9th December 2003 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1296 Tape 1 00:45 Give us a summary of your life. My name is David Brill. I’m from Tasmania, which I’m very proud of. Quite a lot of interesting people come out of Tasmania. Neil Davis [war cameraman and correspondent] and a few others; [Tim] Bowden, 01:00 Christopher Koch, who wrote Living Dangerously, Highways to War. Did you ever see that book, “Highways to War”? It’s a book about partly my life and Neil’s life. It’s won the Miles Franklin award. I’ll show it to you later. I was born in Devonport, a place called Latrobe, which is near Devonport where the main hospital was, in 1944. Went to school in Launceston at Scotch College where I was a warrant officer in the cadet corps, which made 01:30 me very interested in the military. I was at one stage thinking of going to Duntroon [Royal Military College]. I’m very glad I didn’t now, looking back on my life. I always had a passion for communication; journalism, filmmaking, the arts. That’s what I was pretty good at in school, and biology. My parents owned a hotel in Longford just outside Launceston, population of about 12,000 people. I used to look forward to 02:00 getting Life Magazine, which was a weekly magazine then. Probably the greatest pictorial magazine in the world. A lot of wonderful photographers and writers who worked for it. I had a tremendous interest in journalism and photography and filmmaking, not knowing that I would ever go into it. I became president of the Kodak Club at school, which was sponsored by Kodak. My father bought me a Rolleicord, a 2 1/4 square, like 02:30 the Rolleiflex, but the cheaper version, which got my interest going in photography. That’s really all I wanted to do then when I realised what a wonderful thing it was to see your own pictures reproduced in magazines. So I did a cadetship with a company in Hobart called Brian Curtis and Associates, the biggest commercial photographic studios in Tasmania. Before I was allowed to use a camera I spent two 03:00 years learning how to mix chemicals properly. Then I could use the camera, maybe a 4 by 5 speed Graphic, nothing else. On the weekends I could probably take it out for one day and take some 4 by 5 pictures. Then I had to learn how to use an enlarger properly. It’s a tough cadetship, but looking back on it, it’s the best training I ever had. I finished the 5-year cadetship, went to the Hydro Electric Commission as a field photographer, which was a big 03:30 government department building dams, hydroelectric power. I did all that sort of stuff. Television in 1967, it had been going a few years, but it was still pretty new in Tasmania. The ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] was set up there. I thought that the moving picture, particularly news and current affairs and documentary programs, were so important and television was so powerful, it could probably be better than say working for Life. 04:00 Two ambitions I had then. One was to work for Life Magazine; the other was work for Four Corners [ABC current affairs/documentary program]. Four Corners to me was great photojournalism. I didn’t make Life Magazine, but I made Four Corners. I joined the ABC in Hobart in 1966 and we started a program there called Line Up, which was the pilot program for This Day Tonight [ABC current affairs program], which started on the mainland later, the nightly current affairs 04:30 program, work in Tasmania could work anywhere in Australia. So I was fortunate enough to work on that original program, which was great because we could do pieces up to 7 or 8 minutes long, not just news clips. You could really produce a clip. Construct a piece to get the message across, not just in a minute 20 [seconds] like a news story, but a lengthy piece. The program became so popular. I realised then that television was a great way of communication if you wanted to do serious stuff. 05:00 For a while I owned a magazine called The Tasmanian Motorist, which was a motoring magazine. I was part owner with a friend of mine called Des Power - he’s a well-known filmmaker in Queensland now - which was fun, but it was too commercial for me. I thought the ABC was an organisation where you could get good important current affairs programs and documentaries on. That’s the area I wanted to go. Obviously 05:30 Neil Davis had a day-to-day impact on my life because he’d been a Tasmanian and he’d come back from Asia every year and we’d sit and have a chat and I thought this was a really great way to go. So after a couple of years there, I was appointed the ABC’s first cameraman based in Southeast Asia, mainly to cover the Vietnam War. I was engaged. They didn’t want to send a married man in case something would have happened to me. So they took the job away from me, which broke my heart. 06:00 They said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I always wanted to work on Four Corners.” so they transferred me to Sydney and I worked on documentaries for a while and then I went to Four Corners, which to me was the greatest time of my life. To form a program with people like John Pennington, Mike Willesee, Peter Reid, Gordon Vick, Richard Oxenberg, Kerry O’Brien of the News Went On, just really wonderful people, all learning together, all of the same age. There we were, the only major 06:30 current affairs program in Australia. It was just about the same time as This Day Tonight, but we had time. We could go away and do longer, more thoughtful pieces than the other program, we could spend an hour say on Vietnam. So that to me was real photojournalism. It’s like Life Magazine was in a magazine format, but this was a magazine format for television, going out to a very interesting audience. I was about 23. One of the first big 07:00 assignments I did was to go to Vietnam, Mike and I and Bob Sloss, the sound recordist, to Vietnam to have a look at Vietnam, to cover the war. All the stuff coming out on the news programs of guns going off, but so what? How many people were killed that day or whatever? I wanted to know what the war was really about. Why was there a war in Vietnam? We could do that. We could spend the time, which was a terrific advantage. I remember there once 07:30 on this particular assignment, the first one, was we met a little girl who was 7 and had her leg blown off when she was 3. Her parents had been killed in the war; she was being brought into the hospital on her grandmother’s back to be fitted with an artificial leg. It was the most beautiful child then that I’d ever seen in my life. I was 24-25. So I was very young myself. But there was no expression on her face whatsoever. 08:00 She kept staring at me. I realised how powerful this segment was. Putting a sequence up with all the right shots to make a segment and being right in there trying to capture this. Using this little girl in a way as an example of what war is about. Anybody can film the guns going off, but what do those guns do? Here’s an example. There was no expression on her face. You imagine all the other children running around, growing up, she couldn’t run around because she only had one leg. When they put the artificial leg on and she got onto the bar and started to walk, 08:30 it was the first time in her life that she had her own limited independence and she started to smile slightly. So I held this shot and just crept in with a zoom into her face and her eyes staring for about a minute and a half. When we ran that segment in this whole hour film, plus we covered battles and we interviewed this and that to make it into a proper documentary. When that went to air, the impact of that little girl from everybody, I think even Gough Whitlam [Prime Minister of Australia] or somebody said, “The sad little 09:00 girl in Vietnam, what are we doing there?” I heard this second-hand, but that made such an impact, more so than the guns going or the tanks going into battles. I realised how powerful good television, good current affairs can be. You won’t change the world, but you’ll make people aware what’s going on. It’s an education tool. All these years later I’ve stuck by that. It’s the work that I believe in, one way or another. It’s a great privilege to do this work, it’s dangerous, it’s frustrating, 09:30 you never make a lot of money out of it.

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